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Twitter Is Down, Company Working On Problem

Twitter is apparently down. Its engineers are working on the problem now according to a blog post (on Tumblr). There’s no word on what caused the outage or when the site will be back up. Twitter simply times out when you try and load it.

It’s unclear how widespread the outage is or when the problem first occurred. I’ve been unable to access Twitter for the past hour or so.

According to the company’s most recent stats, Twitter has 500 million registered users and 140 million active users (with roughly 60 percent active on mobile).

Most of them are probably asking the question: Now what? Go get another cup of coffee I’d say.

Postscript: Twitter appears to be back now. The company is citing a “cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components” as the culprit in today’s outage.

Postscript #2 by Matt McGee: Twitter has now explained today’s turbulence in a blog post that offers an apology to users worldwide. The company says it became aware of the outage at about 9:00 am PT, when web users were unable to access Twitter and mobile clients stopped showing new tweets.

We immediately began to investigate the issue and found that there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components. This wasn’t due to a hack or our new office or Euro 2012 or GIF avatars, as some have speculated today.

Twitter says that part of the solution to today’s outage was to revert back to a previously stable version of Twitter, and that the service has seen between 99.96 percent and 99.99 percent uptime over the past six months.

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About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.